While covid def fucked up the ability for 4th gen groups to interact with each other I'm pretty sure that they do interact way more than people think offscreen. I know Seonghwa said he doesn't like to talk about his idol friends bc he doesn't want to cause them or their respective fandoms issues and Soobin straight up refused to tell his fans which idols he's friends with. There's a lot of friendships that are under the radar or idols only casually mention so only really invested fans would know

oh absolutely of course there are offscreen friendships. of course they all have idol friends. and as much as i am a total defender of idols' rights to privacy, that's not really what we're talking about here. when you work in a job that has both a public face and heavily relies on communication and networking, there is a certain amount of professional friendship that you need to maintain. arts ent industries are, for lack of a better phrase, big social organisms, and you need to feed that social organism in order to be fed by it in return. so you do, in fact, need to go out for drinks with people publicly, go for meals publicly, that kind of thing, because if you don't, you look antisocial. this is not to say that one is not allowed to be introverted, or to have private relationships, but when the other party is also a public figure (in this instance), you have to negotiate between yourselves how much is private and how much is public. and those to facets can be different. we hear stories all the time of people who act friendly with each other in public but in actuality hate each other's guts, and it is exactly the same thing for the opposite emotions. there are many people in my life with whom i am very close personally, but when we work together or appear in public together, we have a level of professional boundaries. yes it sounds tedious and yes it requires a lot of communication, but it's just a part of the job. if you don't publicly display that you can communicate and are actively friendly with people, how does anyone observing you actually know that?